Change
by FFcrazy15
Summary: An imprisoned Hans goes from being a near-sociopathic villain to a better man. He also goes somewhat insane. (Redemption fic. "Pierced Hearts" universe, not cannon with the second movie. Warnings inside.)


**Change**

**Disclaimer: I neither own the rights to Disney, Frozen, the Disney universe nor any of its associated media, derivatives or products. I do not profit from this work. Royalty-free texture used for the cover image taken from Deviantart's **_**parablev **_**(Cameron Gray) ; find it here: www. deviantart. com [slash] parablev [slash] art [slash] tx0006-61901749 . The story being told in his memory of his mother is Hans Christian Andersen's "Holger the Dane."**

_**Summary: An imprisoned Hans goes from being a near-sociopathic villain to a better man. He also goes somewhat insane. (Redemption fic. "Pierced Hearts" Universe, not cannon with the second movie.)**_

_**CONTENT WARNINGS: **_**suicide attempts, ****solitary confinement, violence, ****depression, hallucinations, mental illness, psychological torture.**

* * *

There's a ringing in his ears as his eyes slowly drift open, and he looks around the shadowy cell.

For a long moment, he doesn't remember where he is or why he's here. He doesn't move, either. He knows instinctively that once he does, something bad will happen. But eventually the icy cold of the floor worms its way into his bones, and he's forced to sit up.

As soon as he does, pain explodes across his body, and he lets out a faint moan. His neck aches as if someone has recently attempted strangling him, and after a moment of confusion he remembers why.

His heart stops. Then it restarts.

_I failed._

Hans stares at the opposite wall. The pain in his neck throbs. The cold of the cell, evinced by the swirling winter snow beyond, is exacerbated by the missing suitcoat, and as he realizes it's gone, he realizes what must have happened: somebody found him and cut him down. Somebody stopped him. _They didn't even bother to call a doctor, _he realizes bitterly, recognizing the implications of his waking up on the floor of the cell rather than the hard wooden bench.

Hatred and bitterness, numbed by exhaustion, are all he can feel. Otherwise, he feels nothing. His heart is frozen solid.

_They won't even let me die on my own terms._

Eventually reality breaks back in, and he dissolves into weeping.

* * *

It's funny, the effect that love can have.

Her memory, so long set aside and repressed, burns in his psyche like a brand. Most of his dreams now are nightmares: mirrors of the hallucinations of the Arendellian queen and her sister that plague him during the daylight, or projections of the future awaiting him, of the noose that will hang from the scaffolding still yet to be built in the empty courtyard outside his window.

But this dream…this _memory_ had been so innocent, so good, that it had broken him.

He doesn't know why his mind chose that one; it had been such an ordinary memory, such an unremarkable day—walking along the boardwalk with his mother and looking out into the bay, listening to the booming of the cannons from the naval exercises and his mother's tales of his ancestors, of great Southern kings who would awaken on the last day. The sky had been blue, the cresting sea bluer, as white seagulls had cawed and arched against the sky and the green copper roofs of his palace home.

Perhaps it was the ordinariness of that memory that had made it so precious. When his eyes had opened, he'd found them already filled with tears—as if he'd known, even while sleeping, that he did not deserve to remember those innocent and happy hours.

He'd wept for grief and self-loathing as he'd braided the noose.

* * *

He won't try to kill himself again. His mother wouldn't have wanted it.

Hans stares stupidly at the opposite wall of the cell. His heart, cold and half-dead as it may be, _burns_ with pain in his chest. He wants to die, he thinks, thickly. He doesn't want to suffer like this.

Fleeting images of the happiest moments of his childhood chase themselves, shadow-like, around the inside of his brain, and he lets out a faint moan, face a dull mask of disgust and despair. Grief, stronger than he's felt in years, has resurfaced as he realizes that the boy in those memories, the boy his mother loved so fiercely, is as dead as she is. The pain of that knowledge takes his breath away. He doesn't want to live with it.

But he can't kill himself, he knows that now, he can't dishonor her further. He has to face what he's done. He has to face that he's _betrayed_ her, betrayed her memory. The one person in his life he ever really cared about, who ever really cared about him. The one pure, unadulteratedly _good thing _in his life. He's betrayed the only person who'd ever loved him.

_But she wouldn't have hated me._ Even in his distressed state he knows that, knows that the moments of thinking otherwise while twisting the lining of his jacket jacket into a noose were just self-loathing, self-pity. Mother had never hated anyone, not even his father. Hatred had been so antithetical to her nature that she would have cried for the devil himself, so she most certainly would not have hated her wayward thirteenth son.

_But mourned me...she would have grieved me, if she were still alive. She would have grieved as if she'd lost me._

She'd loved him, and he'd loved her. Who he is now would have broken her heart.

_Because she was right._

With only his memories of her as an exception, his life until now has been one long lesson that the rules of selfishness and self-interest, ruthlessness and arrogance, were the real rules of how the world worked. Yet what happened that day on the fjord...love, Anna's love for her sister, _had_ thawed the storm. His mother had been _right,_ and his father and brothers—wrong. Nursery-lessons and Sunday-school catechism are flooding back in, and Hans cowers against the bench. He's done a lot of morally gray things in his life, but this—this was _evil. _What he's done is _evil._

_ I'm bad. I'm a bad person._

It feels so—_childish_ to say it that way. But it's true. His mother's sacred memory, the only thing he has never able to tarnish with his cynicism, is being dusted off now in the honest light of day, and in that light he sees the line drawn in the sand from the beginning of time. And he sees which side of it he's on. _I'm a bad person._

He stares at the opposite wall, feeling winded despite not having done any physical exercise in a long time. He sees the future, in that cell, however long he has left, stretching out in front of him...and he recognizes in it a choice.

He can try to kill himself again, and maybe this time succeed. Hans realizes, with fleeting surprise, that he doesn't want to do that. It feels...wrong, too much like giving up. His pride won't let him.

He can shut his conscience down again, continue blaming other people or merely his own stupidity for his situation, continue living through the increasingly violent hallucinations he's been suffering for the last few months. He might go insane, he reasons. He might not. Either way, if he does that he'll lose his mother's memory forever. Good memories are the only things he had left now. He can't lose her, too.

Or...he can try to fight his way back. Try to become someone his mother could have been proud of. He doesn't think he can succeed at that, even if he weren't facing imminent death. It would be easier to give up.

Except...except that for the first time since landing himself in this cell, he feels halfway sane again. The world has started to make sense again, rules of realities beyond the merely physical re-establishing. And his mother's memory rests now, clean and bright, in his mind again. Without the icy scorn and the fiery hatred and black self-pity of the last six months, he faces the terror of the cell psychologically naked...but no longer mentally alone.

He will never be the man his mother had wanted him to be. But only a few hours later, and he feels already like a better, saner man than he has been for a long time. It's like a bucket of cold water has been dumped on his head; it's woken him up and made the world seem real again.

He's terrified. But he's _far_ more terrified of going back where he's been.

* * *

_What you did was wrong._

He stares at the floor. Day One. Step One.

_Not just inconvenient. Not just ill-timed. WRONG._

He's going to repeat it to himself until he believes it. Until he _feels_ it.

Hans knows he's not good at empathy. He also knows it's not surprising; he'd been taught from a young age that feeling sorry for other people is damned useless if nobody is going to feel sorry for _you_ in return. Somebody has to look out for Number One, and apparently it had to be him because nobody else was stepping up to the plate. Selfishness, he reasons, is an elegant system; everybody takes care of themselves, nobody has any right to feel indignant at the consequences.

_Except that's not how the world actually works_, he reminds himself. Ambition didn't thaw the fjord, _love_ did. Selfishness didn't unfreeze Anna's heart, _love_ did. Weakness was their strength. _Selflessness_ was their strength.

_I didn't just fail because I was reckless,_ he reasons, almost amused. _I failed because I didn't even know how the rules of the game worked._

Okay. Back to the mantra. What he did was wrong. _Immoral._ Bad. _Evil._

_So what?_

He shakes his head. No, _not_ "so what." _Pay attention._ Think. He _knows_ he's supposed to feel something at this other than a vague sense of guilt and "badness." He's supposed to "feel their pain" or something, isn't he? He knows he was able to do that before, when he was younger.

_Maybe I can make myself feel it. _He tries, picturing Elsa's broken form on the ice, weeping for her sister. He holds the image in his mind, considering it. At the time it had sparked a vague feeling inside him, for just a moment…

_He's curled over, sobbing behind his bed, praying for God to bring her back._

His heart beats a hard thump, in the silence of the cell. The flash is gone as quickly as it came, and he struggles desperately to link logically what just happened. After a moment, he's gotten hold of it: the memory was sparked by the curve of the Queen's back as she collapsed in grief. He remembers feeling his own tiny frame curl over the same way, when mother died.

_She felt the way I felt back then._

Back in the present, he swallows. He'd _known_ that, logically. He'd twisted it to his advantage in the moment, using memories instinctively to make his case, his behavior more convincing. He realizes with a sickened feeling that he's even tarnished his memories of his mother with his own selfishness, but that's the least of his sins just now. As he focuses on the memory of his mother, of learning of her death, a phantom of longing, _pain, _wells up inside of him, along with desperation and futility.

_Elsa felt this, too._

Grief, horror, _sickness_ fills his stomach, so much that he almost retches—and yet, the horror is accompanied by relief. Relief, because the sisters are not dead. Relief, because he _failed._ For one brief moment, he feels their hope as his own, before it crashes down again. They're alive, yes, but his mother is not. Being happy for their fate will not bring her back.

But the traces of relief persist. He feels strangely _grateful, _that he failed. He's thankful that he did not subject them permanently to the pain he feels now. Their relief becomes his, as weak and shadowy a form as it may be.

_I deserve to be in this cell._

He figures that recognition is a good sign.

* * *

He repeats it to himself every day, the fact that he deserves to be there. Not for his stupidity, not for his failure, but for his _crime._ He spends hours thinking about it, sometimes whole days. There isn't much else to think about.

When he's not thinking about his sins, he thinks about the good times. He hasn't had many, but there were some. The wind on his face while standing at the prow of a ship. The long nights spent up helping nurse a sick baby foal. Playing piano—he misses it. Mother had played piano, too.

Sometimes, when he can bear it, he thinks about Mother.

Thinking about Mother is complicated precisely because it's so simple. He never feels he has a right to remember her, to sully her memory with his tarnished mind, but he _had_ loved her, and she had loved him. She had loved all of her wretched children so desperately. Maybe, Hans muses, maybe it was because they hadn't _been_ wretched back then. They'd just been children, hiding behind her skirts from the looming shadow of their father.

Things begin to come back to him. Little things he'd once loved, poems and songs especially. A few hours of hard thinking and he can usually remember all the verses of a song. He recites them over and over, until they've burned themselves back into his memory.

On rare occasions, he prays. He doesn't know if there's much hope of a God to hear him, or if any God worth praying to _would_ hear a man like him, but he remembers his catechism and scriptures well enough to know that even murderers can sometimes catch the ear of the divine (if it exists). Generally, he asks for "strength." He isn't sure why, other than that it was what his mother had prayed for and he feels like he could use some strength just now.

(Once in a while, feeling almost embarrassed, he works up the courage to say a prayer for the two sisters back in Arendelle. He feels he owes them that, at least.)

He begins to get his physical strength back, at any rate, as he forces himself to eat more, to drink the tinny water his guard provides. One day he begins to force himself to exercise. It helps. It feels like his day is getting some sort of rhythm back to it. He begins to feel sane again.

Until the hallucinations come back.

* * *

"I can't, I can't save you, Anna, it won't work!"

But it doesn't matter. The dying girl doesn't listen, pleading with him, crawling after him around and around the cell as he backs away. Her skin is ice, her hair turning white, fingers weakly stretching out after him, her tearful voice begging him to kiss her. Repulsion of the pallor of her face, the thin blue veins standing out sharper and sharper against her skin propels him backwards, until at last he's backed into the corner, the dying girl's face turning to frost and ice. Her hand reaches out, trembling, and terror drives him to jump over her and flee to the opposite end of the tiny cell where he collapses onto the wooden shelf of his bed, shutting his eyes. There's silence, but he fears to look into the corner, holding back until at last curiosity overwhelms him.

The room is empty. The hallucination of the frozen girl has disappeared, as if it never existed, and he lets out a sigh of relief, looking forward again.

Anna's blue face, open-mouthed, stares back at him.

He screams and scrambles back against the wall as her hand lunges out in a jerking motion with the sound of grinding ice, the hiss of her fogged breath: _"You did this to me! You did this to me!"_

His back hits the wall and he covers his eyes, screaming gibberish, expecting at any moment to feel her icy hands close over his neck.

But nothing happens. He doesn't dare open his eyes again for several minutes, sobbing tearlessly, trying to breathe. When at last he opens them, cringing, he sees that the cell is well and truly empty—before the sudden awareness of a human presence makes him jump.

The eyes of the guard outside the little barred window on the door are narrowed. The prince's mouth moves wordlessly and then closes again, fearful of punishment.

But the trap on the window slides shut, and he's alone again.

Two minutes pass (or maybe two hours) before he's begging Anna's ghost to come back.

* * *

The silence is what gnaws on him. The _loneliness._ Hans was no stranger to loneliness on a spiritual level; he'd never really had friends, and his interactions with his family had barely been a step up from isolation, growing up.

But that _step up,_ he soon finds, was very, _very_ real.

He has no human contact in the cell. With his icy shell of rage and apathy beginning to thaw, the effects of the silence and isolation are becoming apparent. It wasn't that they hadn't affected him before, he realizes; they'd been driving him insane all the last long, six months.

It's just that he can _feel_ it now.

Sometimes he paces, talking to himself. Sometimes he recites poems or songs _ad nauseum,_ trying to give some sense of time and order to life in the cell. Sometimes he folds and refolds his thin blanket for hours, until his arms ache, just for something to do. He spends a lot of the day staring out the window into the empty courtyard. There's little change; it's too dark in the other cells' windows to see the prisoners inside, and glass covers _his_ window beyond the bars so that he can't talk to anyone even by shouting. The sky fades from indigo to pink to blue, and back to pink and indigo again. He watches the northern lights on the nights where they appear for hours, fascinated by their shifting bands.

One morning, when dawn comes again and the lights vanish, he weeps as if he's lost a friend. He doesn't know why.

But most of the day is consumed with monotony. Hallucinations become welcome interventions; so do visits from his brothers, usually accompanied by beatings. He mouths off to them intentionally whenever they visit, relishing in the painful welts or broken bones they leave behind when they return to the world above. At least it's something new.

But their visits grow rarer as the weeks and months progress. By spring, any form of human interaction is rare, except for the guard who brings him his meager breakfast and supper twice a day. He never thought he'd miss his brothers' presence quite like this—or at all.

* * *

(He's not going to remember any of this.

"Queen Elsa! You have to– to write her, or–"

"Shut up," Balthazar snarls, irritated. "And keep the damned gloves on next time!"

Hans stares. "The...gloves…"

Sparks begin to light up in his mind as much as the air around him. Gloves..._Father always insisted on his sons wearing gloves…_

The thoughts are driven out of his mind as his brother places a well-aimed stamp, and breaks his ankle.)

* * *

He wakes up one morning with a broken ankle, and doesn't remember where it came from.

He chalks it up to amnesia, brought on by a temporary fit of insanity. Maybe one of his brothers beat him senseless and in the process hit his head on the stone. That would explain the splitting headache. Or maybe he did something foolish and harmed himself badly in a fit of self-loathing or madness.

It worries him. He wonders if there are other things from the cell that he can't remember. He intends to ask the guard that evening if perhaps he has another personality, or has experienced other fits of rage that he can't recall.

But the guard never comes. For two days, he's left without food or fresh water.

He wonders by sunrise on the third whether he'll ever see the noose.

* * *

On the evening they finally feed him, the guard has changed. It's unexpectedly frightening; change, the very thing he craves, also scares him. But when the guard glances up, with pity in his eyes, Hans makes a startling discovery: unlike his former keeper, this man is not a sadist. He is not cruel. He feels bad for the man in the cell.

"How did you end up my guard?" he asks one night, his voice hoarse from disuse. The new guard jumps.

"Th-That's not your business."

"You don't want to be here. I can see it in your eyes." The ex-prince's face is hollow and gaunt, but his green eyes seem uncomfortably raw and open to the guard. "You don't like seeing me like this."

The guard retreats abruptly and shuts the door. Hans can feel his heart hammering in his chest.

It's the most human interaction he's had in weeks.

* * *

"I was demoted for mouthing off to a superior officer."

The prisoner looks up from his received helping of moldy bread—leftovers from the palace kitchen. The guard isn't looking at him.

"I'm here as punishment. It's not like I enjoy being your jailer."

"Then why not leave?"

"I have a family to feed."

There's a cavern between them, the ex-prince muses. He, here, inside the cell that has become his whole world. And this man, a person who belongs to the world beyond.

The guard doesn't meet his eyes once before he leaves again. A flicker of life, like a precious flame in winter, blooms in Hans's mind.

* * *

"It's the silence that's the worst."

The guard looks up. It's breakfast time.

"All day. Just...silent." Hans draws a breath. "I think I'm going crazy in here."

"The other prisoners can hear you screaming."

Hans looks up abruptly. It's the first realization he's had that his life in the cell has some sort of _effect_ on other people. He licks his lips, finding them suddenly dry.

"Tell them...um," he laughs a bit, off-kilter, "tell them I'll try to keep the noise down."

The smile that flashes across the guard's face at the weak joke is more precious than gold.

"I will."

* * *

"Please. Have a little pity. I'm human too."

The guard looks him up and down. Hans tries to look earnest. Then he tries to stop. He's trying not to be a manipulative bastard these days, even as the screams of desperation pound at the inside of his skull.

"I can't promise anything." Relief floods the ex-prince; his request for a smuggled book was risky at best, yet his instincts were right: the guard is a good man. "But if you've got a preference…"

A thousand requests flash through his mind: fairy tales, favorite Shakespeare, naval strategy for a distraction, a pen and paper to write his _own_ stories…

But he settles on something he knows won't be missed. Something that will consume him for hours. Maybe something that will kick some sense, or sanity, back into him.

"Plato. Bring me Plato."

* * *

The guard brings him the _Gorgias._ Because _of course_ he does.

It's fate or purgatory, and he's not sure which, but by the end of it he feels like a bastard and he's pretty sure that's the point. He supposes it's only fitting that in his darkest hour, he's brought a philosophical lecture on _telling the truth_ and the benefits of _punishment._

He reads it because it's something to read, and then rereads it because he knows he needs to. By the third time he's memorizing certain passages. By the fourth, he's skipping others and starting to think deeply on the important ones.

If he's got a soul, he's pretty sure it's in hot water. But_ if_ he's got one, then getting caught and punished for his crimes might have been the best thing for it.

(Although, he thinks bitterly, probably not _this_ kind of punishment. Repentance requires sanity, after all.)

He starts to think about death a lot. He'd thought about it before, of course—difficult not to, considering—but it becomes...less terrifying, and simultaneously less inviting. He no longer _craves_ the escape of death the way he did in those first torturous days after his attempt at suicide, and consequently his fear of it is lessening.

He would have had to die someday anyway, he muses. Plato lived, and Plato died. All men do. Maybe...maybe there's a chance he can see his mother again. Maybe, if Heaven lets him in. (Maybe, if Hell won't take him.)

One night, he dreams again. He doesn't dream often now, at least not about anything interesting, unless it's a nightmare. But this time, he dreams of being in his cell, and trying the door. It opens, and he races down to the pier, onto a ship, and sets sail. The wind and the sun are in his face.

He wakes up crying.

His heart is softening, and it _hurts._ It hurts so badly he wants to scream and vomit at the same moment as he realizes how much he's lost. He'll never sail again. He'll never ride Sitron, never play music, never walk a damned city street again. He gave up _everything_ he actually cared about, and for what? For _what?_

_ For the look on their faces when I gave them food for their children. For their gratitude and adulation as I passed them blankets and hot drink. For the way I felt I was important around them, felt like I mattered—for _once_, that I mattered._

It's a startling realization: he's not fully wretched. He didn't want power, Hans realizes. Somehow, he'd always known what he'd truly craved, deep down: he'd wanted their _love._

It's three days later that he finally realizes what he really wanted.

He wanted to be able to love _himself._

* * *

Arendelle is painful to remember, but parts of it begin join the memories of the good times.

_I helped them. I saved their lives. People are alive right now because of me. My life wasn't a complete waste._

It's small, but it begins to give him the strength to face the gallows.

* * *

Except his brothers are dragging this out, for some unknown reason, and he _still can't see scaffolding in the courtyard._

* * *

"Prince Hans."

"Go away," he tells the ice queen, turning the next page of the _Gorgias_. "I'm studying now."

There's a beat of silence. Then he looks up. The hallucination is gone, and the cell is otherwise empty. Hans stands and looks around. He even looks under the bed, suspicious. There's nobody there.

"What the hell?" he demands of the silent air. "That _worked?"_

* * *

She _really _doesn't like it when he apologizes.

Pain wracks every nerve of his body, pinned weakly to the ground by icicles that he _knows_ aren't _real, _but which really _fucking feel real, _and he spits at her feet.

"You're not the Queen," he growls.

The Arendellian monarch's vengeful corpse stares down at him. "How do you know?"

"Because I failed."

"Did you?"

_Did he?_

It's moments like these where his mind fractures into a dozen different realities, his imagination, always so prodigious, spinning off into confusing, alternate possibilities.

_Did I?_

He steadies himself. He looks at her. He _knows_ he failed.

"If I killed you...then I'm _sorry."_

Another icicle, this one aimed for his heart. He flinches badly and opens his eyes.

The cell is empty.

* * *

Bertram is a kind man, Hans muses one day. He was made aware of the name of his guard a week before. He's a good, kind man, the kind who neglects to close the trap on the window one day and then "forgets" every day afterwards.

Hans spends most of the day reading now, or sitting with his back to the door, listening to the noises of the other prisoners. They're distant and remote, but they're _human_ noises. He cherishes them like precious treasures, like fine wine, like good conversation.

* * *

He doesn't realize he's started to talk out loud to himself until he notices Bertram loitering outside his cell one day, and the former prince cuts himself off abruptly. He doesn't have a lot of pride left, but for his guard to see him making up _children's_ _stories_ to fill the air…

"Don't stop. I need to know how it ends."

Hans blinks. "...Wh...why?"

Bertram smiles nervously.

"I tell your stories to my boy at night, before he goes to sleep. He says they're the best he's ever heard."

With an abrupt rush of pride, his life has _meaning_ again. "H-He does?" Bertram nods. "That's...I'm glad."

"He's sick," Bertram confesses in a rush. "He's always been a frail child, but ever since last winter—he's stuck in his room all day. Your stories mean the world to him."

_Your stories mean the world to him._

And suddenly, Hans isn't just living for himself anymore. Now there's a little boy out there, stuck in a cell, who needs him. He's so relieved he cries that night. He's _needed_ again, needed like he was at Arendelle. He means something to _someone_.

He spends the whole of the next day coming up with a new story for the boy. It has to be perfect. It has to be the greatest story ever told.

* * *

Bertram brings him paper and a pen every morning now, and takes it back every evening. Hans spends the day alternating between reading and writing. He realizes that he's retreated to a childhood habit, inventing fairytales to escape his own life, but it's better than nothing. His stories are, by necessity, poorly researched when it comes to places or subjects he hasn't studied and are oftentimes rather homey, revolving around animated household utensils or average goings-on in a typical town. But Bertram's son seems to adore them, and they're something to live for.

* * *

They find the paper.

Bertram is demoted again. He's being reassigned.

"Don't go," Hans pleads with him, crying, like a child. "Please. The next guard—they won't–"

"I'm sorry. I don't have a choice."

_"Please…"_

* * *

After Bertram's gone, the window in the door remains shut. His book is gone. His paper, gone. The sounds of the other prisoners, _gone._

His mind starts to unravel again. He paces the cell, four steps, turn to the right, four steps, turn to the right.

For hours.

And hours.

And _hours._

Sometimes he watches out the window into the courtyard, but so little changes that it doesn't seem to matter. His sense of self is disintegrating. Soon, when people occasionally come into the courtyard, he finds himself backing against the opposite wall of his cell, shaking. He's becoming terrified of people, he realizes. They're so foreign, unfamiliar, _alien_ that he doesn't know what to do.

Some scrap of his mind tells him he should rally against this, try to summon his mental energies and maintain his rapidly eroding sanity. The much bigger part of his brain reasons, sluggishly, that it doesn't matter. He's going to die. Nobody cares about him anymore. There's no reason _not_ to go insane.

His brothers are his only company now, when they bother to come at all. It's always an opportunity for them to mock him, to see how far he's fallen, oftentimes to physically beat him. He relishes these moments more than ever. They prove that he's still alive, that he still exists. But then his brothers leave, and the pain throbs and fades away, and he's left alone again—for days, sometimes for weeks. Alone.

Even Elsa and Anna stop visiting. For a while, he craves the hallucinations, begs them tearfully to come back, to give him some company, to break the monotony. Eventually, that craving too melts away.

One day, even the pacing stops. His need to control whatever he still can of his environment has dissipated into nothing. He sits and stares at the wall, and waits, patiently, for death.

* * *

On the night of the first autumn frost, he dreams about his mother again. It's Christmastime, and they're playing carols on the piano.

When he wakes up, something is alive in him again.

He recites, silently, the passages of the _Gorgias_ throughout the night until he's sure he remembers it perfectly, that it will never leak out of his brain. The stories he's written seem to be filling him up inside, like mulled wine, hot and sustaining.

He's going to die. He _knows_ he's going to die. But he's going to die as someone his mother can be _proud _of.

* * *

_What I did was wrong._

He stares down the hallucinated ice queen.

_And I'm sorry._

She's going to freeze his heart solid. He meets her eyes, breathing hard.

_It was wrong because it hurt you. I hurt you. I hurt your sister._

He _will not_ die a monster, he vows to himself. He will die a better man.

* * *

_Why did you care what they thought of you?_

He sits with his elbows on his knees. The cell is quiet, but his thoughts are loud. It's comforting.

_Why did you want to help them?_

He's back in Arendelle. People are showering him with gratitude, with praise, with love.

_I wanted to prove that I was worth something. That I deserved...I don't know, that I deserved everything I'd never had._

_ Which was?_

_ Love. Affection. Praise._

He had wanted to believe he was _worthy…_and of what, at base? What was it he'd craved?

_You wanted to believe you could be loved. You wanted to be able to love yourself._

He doesn't love himself. He _hates_ himself. Mostly because "himself" landed him here...but also because "himself" is not a very good person.

_But the qualities they liked in you...what were they?_

_ Generosity. Leadership. Compassion._

He's still not good at empathy. But he _had_ cared about the townspeople, in a rational sort of way. He had _wanted_ them to be happy. He had wanted, not just to be treated like a hero, but to _be_ their hero.

He can't do much of anything for anyone, not in _here._ But he can remember the good things he's done, even if they were for selfish reasons. He can pretend, for just a moment, that there is a chance of escaping, of rejoining the world again, and he can make his empty promises.

_If I ever get out of here,_ he vows, _I'll do better. I'll _be_ better._

He realizes, to his shock and a thrill of hope, that he _means_ it.

* * *

He's getting out.

He's _getting out._

Hope fills him, even as he plots and schemes for a way to defeat his elder brother's machinations. Freedom is in front of him, abruptly, suddenly, like a bird arching through the air in the courtyard outside his window.

_I'm getting out._

He swears, to God and the earth and his mother's memory, that he will not waste this second chance.

* * *

They're watching him. Seeing how he'll react.

He wants to scream and hide. He _wants_ to cower in the corner, every animal instinct driving him to retreat away from the overwhelming, the hostile, the unfamiliar. And he almost does.

But what do you know? He still has a spark left of his old pride, after all.

He smirks, even though his heart is thundering in his chest, and meets their eyes.

"Well, isn't this nice. You've all come out to see me."

The abrupt freedom and human contact is _terrifying, _even more so because he knows he's in the lion's den with these twelve around. But he's come through hell and made it out alive. He's fought demons and won. Let Jacob brag of his victory over God; Hans has wrestled with the devil. And he will not let _them_ get the better of him.

"Excuse me, gentlemen, but I'd rather like a hot bath. And have the maid bring around some mulled wine, would you?" And on a badly healed ankle, a fractured psyche, he limps towards the comfort of solitude. He prays they won't touch him, and they don't, until he's in the hallway and then his bedroom and the door is shut securely behind him. He tries the lock lightly and finds it can open. He isn't trapped.

Then he sinks to the ground, buries his head in his knees, and sobs silently with relief. He's free. He's _free._

_You made a promise._

Soon, he will be on his way to Arendelle. Soon, he will face a choice: go along with what Agnar wants, or risk death to help those he once harmed. There is fear in his heart, but a lightness there, too. He can almost see his mother standing in the sunlight from his bedroom window.

He made a promise. He's going to keep it.

_And after that…_

After that, into the world again. He's made an oath, he reminds himself, resolutely. He's going to change. He's going to be a better man.

* * *

**A/N: This story is based off research on the psychological effects of solitary confinement, albeit toned down slightly for the sake of narrative. Unlike Hans, most solitary confinement prisoners do not have windows, and some are deprived of reading material or other distractions. Approximately 80,000-100,000 people are contained in solitary confinement in the United States today, some of them for months, years, or even decades at a time.**

**According to Wikipedia, "In 2002, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America, chaired by John Joseph Gibbons and Nicholas Katzenbach found that: 'The increasing use of high-security segregation is counter-productive, often causing violence inside facilities and contributing to recidivism after release.'"**

**Hans's decision to repent in this story is to be read as occurring _in spite of,_ and not because of, this punishment.**


End file.
